The Duchess Ate Graham Crackers

When we were in Borneo climbing Mount Kinabalu, I sharply recall the duchess complaining that she'd been taught that vodka was all but odourless, which was plain fact up to a point, but when you were good and saturated in the stuff the truth was you couldn't help but reek potently and to the notice of all in range. You could argue that the three things the duchess loved most were cats, Japanese 'pinku' movies, and bottomless martinis, gin or vodka-based (per the daily vicissitudes of mood and fancy). When the great cocksman Koshimi of Azerbaijan lay just that one brief night with the duchess it is said that, as he looked down upon her on the bed he saw a look of challenge and reprisal so severe and scorching that he does not wish to ever summon it to mind again, may God and the angels stand proud and erect in their duck boots humming George Gershwin. When his friend Bruno Sanntario asks him what happened after satisfactory consummation of the copulation and discomfiting brinksmanship, Koshimi of Azerbaijan is quoted as saying: "The duchess ate graham crackers."

The duchess sat by the well in gentle mediation 

for aeons and aeons....

Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Harun Farocki, 1989)

Happy Here and Now (Michael Almereyda, 2002)

24 Frames (Abbas Kiarostami, 2017)

Seven Collages with Introduction

 A mask traversed the air, causing people of multiple and complex lives to disappear, and took human form at a café terrace. The silhouette of a man appeared in profile; so, simultaneously, did thousands. There really were thousands.

-Raymond Queneau, Witch Grass

It is the position of Gilles Deleuze in his profoundly useful Proust and Signs that "all signs converge upon art" and "all apprenticeships, by the most diverse paths, are already unconscious apprenticeships to art itself." Listen to Susan Sontag and learn to surf and skate the incoming incomprehensible array of finicky signs without succumbing to the delirium of interpretation. You're probably leaning psychotic if you think you can read the signs with any regularity. The artist moves and gathers and ideally the artist moves and gathers in fraternal accord with the opaque and inscrutable order of signs, which pop up out of the material world to conduct explicitly metaphysical business. For Jacques Lacan, mob boss of psychoanalysis, metaphor and metonymy create meaning by running into their own epistemological limit and the endless displacement of desire, and before that's what art already is, it's what a creature negotiating the surface of the earth always already was. I have provided seven new collages below as though I were a wee fortune cookie with nary a care in this badly had world, and I have dotingly named each collage as though it were a child. I promise that if you come after me with daffy interpretations you're going to get yourself mostly lost (and no doubt in a bit of a funk). Originally I thought I might do ten collages in homage to Abbas Kiarostami's pathbreaking 2002 video masterpiece Ten, which I first saw back in the day at the Calgary International Film Festival and for which I harbour a great abiding passion. We might call the production values of Ten "deceptively low." Kiarostami sets up the filming of ten conversations between a harried, stressed-out female motorist (Mania Akbari) and a series of passengers, not least her petulant and bossy son, all of it covered with two video cameras mounted on the dash, one trained on the driver and the other on the passenger. Formal constraints and mathematical formal parameters are enough to get the art life kicking again to the tune of "what the exact fuck be thee?" I stopped the collages at number seven instead of at ten because it was obvious number seven was the last one.

I would like to close out in stridently declaring that the Iranian-Persian people are beautiful and heroic and that they love poetry very, very much...but their state is absolute trash...so the Iranian citizenry can use whatever help it can get...

Meltdown!

   

Put a Tiger in Your Tank!

Contributions from South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan 

That Bitch is Crazy

One or Several Wolves?

Hexen Hour

Australian Open

Triptych Arithmetic

 Was it possible that 2027 was a prime number? He turned on his computer and checked quickly: true enough, 2027 was a prime. That struck him as monstrous and unnatural, but in a way that abnormality was typical of prime numbers. The distribution of prime numbers had driven quite a few people mad throughout Western history. 

- Michel Houellebecq, Annihilation

Trois couleurs: Blanc (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1994) and Iguana (Monte Hellman, 1988)

La maman et la putain (Jean Eustache, 1973) and La Frontière de l'aube (Philippe Garrel, 2008)

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) and Fruit of Paradise (Vera Chytilová, 1970)

Michael Nyman, "Time Lapse"

Top Ten Hip Hop Albums

 

Boogie Down Productions, By All Means Necessary

Common, Can I Borrow a Dollar?

Bobby Digital, Digi Snacks

Ol' Dirty Bastard, N***a Please

Kool Keith, Sex Style

Kendrick Lamar, Damn.

Run-D.M.C., King of Rock

Antipop Consortium, Tragic Epilogue

Yo Majesty, Futuristically Speaking...Never Be Afraid

Dr. Dre, The Chronic

"Buy Love" by Yo Majesty

Transcript Superball

 

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)

For Alfred Hitchcock, nothing is too ridiculous or far-fetched so long as the audience is kept rolling along with the connivance and trickery, excited to see where they're going. Margaret concedes that she may sometimes pose a danger to others when she goes without her psychiatric medications. Margaret should take the medication even if not taking the medication might make for a more interesting story. The Babylonian Empire was taken over and resolutely thumped by the Persian Empire in 539BCE. Angolans have a strong ethnic and national identity that is nevertheless striated by Portuguese influences. Legendary cowboy actor John Wayne smoked between five and seven packs of cigarettes per day, and yet he forbade his own sons from smoking. Tippi Hedren, with whom Alfred Hitchcock was pathologically obsessed, was tortured during the production of The Birds, spending five days with live birds thrown at her and attached to her person with elastic bands. Hedren additionally accuses Hitchcock of making aggressive advances toward her in the back of a limousine, which I for one am prepared to accept as more than probable. Not only do her wit, verve, and improvisational skills save her own ass, Scheherazade manages also to restore the wayward heart of the King. When the get-up-and-go outruns the buckle-down-and-do, what's there ultimately to do except fervently hump your barbed wire Australian canoe after having called in sick with the flu? Jasper used to pay $5.00 a month rent on a cold water Brooklyn flat and was boffing Sally Kirkland who was doing a little innocent Off-Broadway nudity at the time and was therefore all the town was talking about, as it were. The Celtic goddess Abnoba reins over Greater Germany's mythological black forest. The Danube owes its name to a Celtic goddess of tempestuous maternity. The supreme German proto-Romantic, Friedrich Hölderlin: "Isn't everything alive already in your blood?" I tucked my beloved in between discreet sheets of museum-grade glass. My lover is a pressed flower and I the harbinger owl. In fighting every single person every step of the way, Victor Hugo, transformed from royalist to raging Republican, became a national hero and figure of the French Republic. When a camera slowly tracks across a group of people in Hitchcock you start to wonder how many sick and perverted malefactors are secretly concealed by the crowd in all its superficial innocuousness. My favourite snacks are raspberries and mango. I like my steak nice and pink. Shakespeare's plays were staged during a time when there were still public executions, and vendors sold snack foods at both the plays and the executions. Jasper loves the part in The Strawberry Blonde where James Cagney goes: "that's the kind of a hairpin I am!" Gladys says her elderly mother believes the main reason so many renegade Nazis went to Argentina was because they believed the gates of hell to be concealed somewhere remote in the South American jungle. My dentist tells me in a low tone that there is something mysterious about the earth's core. Why does it seem like he thinks we're conspiring? We ain't doing no such thing. The drill rattles around my head like shockwaves of metallic applause. As a moody teenager, there were days Arlene could not bring herself to eat anything more substantial than chips and salsa or a couple slices of processed cheese. Don't press the the red button on the Abundance box. If everyone had to do better or die what do you think the numbers might look like? Stephen Geoffreys, the cute and dorky Evil Ed in mainstream 1985 horror flick Fright Night, went on immediately from there to become a star of hardcore gay porn. Harold says the best way to edit is to slowly transcribe it all over again, perhaps moving it in so doing from one place to another. I was getting loud and mouthy with my mouth full of egg and Canadian bacon across from Archer at the Denny's on Macleod and Archer raised his hand and quoted his infernal Socrates at me: "The best, when corrupted, become the worst." Archer isn't wrong if not exactly right and I plan to get out of my own way sometime approximately this very night. For me it's out of the frying pan and into the fire...except for the fact that I'm also a greasy, shimmering turd. As a teenager I learned how to drive standard transmission from a dream. The filmmaker Robert Bresson, who I have at times had the chutzpah to call the greatest artist of all time, could evidently be a real creep in his own right and would not appear to have treated Anne Wiazemski all that much better than Hitchcock did Tippi Hedren, though it is true that he did not fasten live birds to anybody. I do not have what it takes to be a film director because my stress-management is unusually poor. All your movie needs is a girl and a gun and some stupidly-grinning mark in a ten-gallon hat to bankroll the fiasco. Polish-Jewish writer and visual artist Bruno Schulz, migrant of somnolence, was shot dead in the streets by an S.S. officer who knew Schulz personally and was motivated at least in part by jealousy. For absence of miracles we go on producing our crude and clumsy monstrosities of division.  

   

           

   

Top Ten Canadian Rock Albums

The Primrods, kneecappin'!

The Courtneys, s/t

AIDS Wolf - Cities of Glass

Shearing Pinx, Poison Hands

Simply Saucer, Cyborgs Revisited

Mecca Normal, Flood Plain

Eric's Trip, Love Tara

The Smugglers, In the Hall of Fame

B.T.O., Street Action

Lab Coast, Remember the Moon

 

Calgarians

 

A few years back a friend and I, both residents of the city of Calgary, went to Chicago to give the town a proper once over and check out a bunch of live music in a number of historic or quasi-historic venues. I can assure readers that the citizenry of Musicland Chic-a-go-go can be relied upon to provide the very best advise respective of good places to eat windy city treats. Frankly, my friend and I dined like potentates. When one Chicago musician heard me use the word "Calgarians," he said it sounded like some ferocious tribe from the series Game of Thrones. The next night my friend and I checked out some black metal at the Empty Bottle and at some point an oddly leering man in a black suit came up to me and asked if I was enjoying my trip to Chicago, then, turning wistfully toward the stage, declaiming, but somehow cheerfully: "I hate this music!" Momentarily perplexed, I quickly deduced that the stranger, harmless and even amiable, was a follower of my friend and fellow Calgarian on this or that or however many social media (harvesters of) organs. Always remember, Mizzz 5th of November, that when you tell the whole world where you're going you increase the likelihood of being intercepted a hundredfold.

I went to the last show at the Black Lounge in the University of Calgary's MacEwan Hall, back for the summer, I believe, from my first year of undergraduate studies out East, and my girlfriend and I got so stoned it was ridiculous. We spent at least as much time tripping out in the racket ball courts as we did checking out the bands (including headliners Chixdiggit). On the way home from the show, I became disoriented in a construction zone and found myself facing oncoming traffic on Sarcee such that I had no choice but to hit the ditch and get back to the correct side. Which I did just fine. It's the country in me. Nor was my girlfriend especially phased. This is the lass for whom I fell hard on the occasion of her having gotten out of my car at a red light to go and ask the man three cars ahead of us if she could have his cigar.

Calgary was a sensible place to build a fledgling city for the not-uncommon reason that two major rivers meet here. Those who pioneered this dicey in-between territory assured that their own progeny would themselves breed multitudes of crust and steam punks. Calgary does assuredly get mighty cold, but the overall dryness of its climate is no small mercy. Not to mention the warm mountain winds that take a bit of the sting out of winter. There are about 1.5 million Calgarians, but they cannot possibly be up to all that much or I'd have surely caught wind of it by now.

      

The Knack

 

El ángel exterminador (Luis Buñuel, 1962)

The Knack...and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965)

I told the ladies that it was not impossible to behold in the beloved both a new constellation in the heavens and a loser with no spine, all the brunt of it, and that I felt as though in the past year I had won an enormous battle over a vast kingdom only to attain for my troubles the right to die of exposure or dehydration under a terrible tangerine sky with the flesh slowly bubbling and gassing. Patricia was sitting right across from me and looked upon me with grave concern. She told me I should avoid getting myself isolated in remote places and advised me to be suspicious of Google Maps. Aida said also to never forget you are trapped in samsara, a learning hell meant to transform you into some much more satisfactory thing, not unlike the butterfly, newly suited for a better cosmic set-up. Reality is mystical, shimmering, and chimerical and it's chasing its own tail.

Rose is angry with the "big, bad bossy people." Cassie hates cruel and treacherous friends of the altogether false variety. Lorraine hates "stupid, noxious parasites." She is once purported to have stated outright that ethnic people smell funny because of the weird food they eat. She can't get away with that shit around here. Lol. She once bragged to me that she's better at deceit than I am. Go for it, girl. Heh heh. I'd rather have the free time and undisturbed slumber.

Aida now addresses the whole table. "When your government pitches some new 'stimulus' package as though infinite economic growth were a foreordained given, remember that in Latin 'stimulus' means a goad, prick, sting, spur, or incitement and that the plural, 'stimuli,' comes from a root related to sharp points. We are each of us born into brutal and insensate servitude." Jo agrees and extends her pint glass in salute, not forgetting to add that neither Casanova nor Lord Byron were attractive nor was either man even remotely competent as a lover, not that they failed to mount many, as legend dutifully tells. "History," she insists, "is written by the spoilage."

I told the ladies about a poem I wrote as a teenager in which there was this very lofty line about how I had set off to make love to every single person because nobody had taken the time to tell me I could not. Most of the ladies chuckled. I dated multiple people at a time until I was nineteen or twenty. I hit a wall or I hit burn-out or both. I only really needed one pretty pony with two or three tricks. Fattened on greed, the human animal pukes its own miserable, godforsaken guts out. Patricia got a little sullen and accused me of preferring to retreat from the field of battle altogether rather than potentially contribute to unnecessary or excessive carnage. Well, I mean, Christ on crutches, Patricia! Wtf? Where is it you've gone got yourself zoned? Jo, tipsy, proposes just then a toast:

"To Wayfaring—"